Posts Tagged ‘do what scares you’

You’ve made the plan. You know what you want and have a good idea of how you might go about starting to get it. It’s all there – all you’ve got to do is make the call, spend the money, have the difficult conversation.

Often this is the point where the detailed plan gets put aside for a little bit, maybe for too long. If you leave it long enough then the plan becomes redundant. A part of you, the part that likes the safety of dreaming and planning, likes that tactic, because it just gets to enjoy creating a vision all over again without having to do the difficult work. That’s why “vision quest” type books and workshops sell so well, because they allow us to justify procrastinating indefinitely.

I remember once asking someone how they went at a motivational seminar they had just attended. “Awesome!” came the reply, “I felt a real shift!”

“Shifts” are nice – and important (I enjoy a good shift as much as the next guy) but Einstein was right – nothing happens until something moves.

Sometime ago now, I posted a free e-book to the web called Curly’s Law. Thousands of people have downloaded it, and still do, but I haven’t read it for a while.

I probably should; I suspect it’s pretty crap. I was on a bit of an “online marketing” trip in a style that I’ve since moved well away from, but that’s not the point. The point is the idea in the book, which is simply:

Do One Thing.

This is something I believe in. It’s been my mission for some time to discover exactly what that one thing is (career-wise).

I actually discovered it ages ago, but I confused myself by thinking about it too much. However, I eventually worked through it and some time ago came around to being cool with my decision. Yet I’ve never really told anyone … so here it is…

It’s not JUST music.

It’s not JUST writing.

It’s not JUST my freelance business.

It’s not just any one thing that I do.

My one thing is my personal brand: Seamus Anthony.

My mission is to build brand awareness and momentum and in the process make a sweet living doing stuff I love.

And, although there’s a LOT of work to do yet, I’m well on the way. I don’t have a job, I am making OK money just being me doing things I like and am good at. But there’s one thing I have been trying to do which is pretty hard in a connected, Googlified world: I have been trying to keep the brand “Seamus Anthony” separate from the freelance business, mainly because to start with I just didn’t actually appreciate how cool the business is, and that I keep getting to do it instead of having to schlep off to a job I hate.

The business itself is becoming increasingly sophisticated in scope and much more in line with my actual talents, which just makes the whole idea of trying to keep the two identities separate even sillier.

So I am 99.99% certain that I am going to file the freelance business as a sub-brand under the mother-brand and bring it all together. I feel confident it’s going to work. It’s really going to add cohesion to the Story – and that’s what it’s all about in the end, Story.

Do What Scares You

Actually for some reason doing this, bringing it all under the one brand umbrella, scares me silly.

I’m going to do it anyway because, I’ve often found that if I feel frightened about an idea before starting, it ends up being a most exciting and dynamic thing to do.

P.S. that’s why I have started blogging here again too. Not the fear thing, the branding thing.